This forum is provided for the benefit of beekeepers internationally, and particularly welcomes input from beekeepers in Scotland. Like all internet discussion fora it can contain humour and banter that may not be appreciated by all. The only rule is not to be abusive. The ethos of the forum is that posters should self-moderate as far as possible rather than be subjected to editorial interference. Naturally, the views represented here do not represent those of the SBA.

I had an interesting thing happen. I made up a nuc at the end of April and it developed a nice Queen cell which hatched fine. We had a spell of lovely weather just right for mating.
Then I noticed a large number of bees clustering under the nuc (it is a Payne’s polynuc with a mesh section in the floor) initially I wondered if they had reared two queens and were about to swarm. But the cluster persisted for several days during which I did not have time to deal with it. I wondered if the nuc was very congested. A few days ago I went through the nuc. No eggs. Lots of bees inside the nuc but not overcrowded. I transferred the frames into a National hive and brushed the cluster off the bottom of the nuc into the hive. Since then the bees have all stayed in the hive and flown as usual
Is it possible that the queen flew and mated and on return missed the entrance and ended up on the outside of the mesh floor and then workers clustered round her??

My one allowance to fiddling this year is to compare 14x12 with [double brood] nationals. So to that end I've basically shook swarmed one of the nucs, with a single frame of brood, into a 14x12 Nuc with a mix of comb and foundation and a good feed. All the rest of the brood is now in the other nuc which is on a single brood national and a super frame for drone. Going to give that a week or so to really get going and then add a Super in the first instance, a second brood box can likely wait until next year I suspect. Ideally want one apiary on 14x12 and the other on Nationals and never the twain shall meet, but for now they're both on in the same place.

This weekend has been making up new hive stands and getting some paving slabs to finally sort out making the main apiary start to look half decent again.

This was recorded two weeks ago but was only broadcast today. Donít worry I didnít smoke the bees to death! They wanted sound effects for the radio which also included moving frames out of the hives so they could get the mike in. Unfortunately this item was heavily edited and us talking about our near native dark bees was left out. But at least we got the Varroa message across.
Press play and use the dark blue bar on the bottom of the screen to scroll to15:30https://m.mixcloud.com/radioorkney/a...30th-may-2019/
Iím off to the bees now for first time in two weeks!!! (Itís been far to cold for opening up the hives.)
Hereís a link for photos put on their Facebook page today.https://m.facebook.com/media/set/?se...Q&__tn__=-UC-R

This was recorded two weeks ago but was only broadcast today. Don’t worry I didn’t smoke the bees to death! They wanted sound effects for the radio which also included moving frames out of the hives so they could get the mike in. Unfortunately this item was heavily edited and us talking about our near native dark bees was left out. But at least we got the Varroa message across.
Press play and use the dark blue bar on the bottom of the screen to scroll to15:30

I had a listen. It's always the case that a programmes is edited in the way you don't like too much. However it sounded good.